Containers like Docker and Rocket are getting more popular every day. In my conversations with customers, they consistently ask what containers are and how they can use them in their environment. If you’re as curious as most people, read on. . .

How did this happen?

From what I understand, containers grew out of Google’s (and others’) need for massive horizontal scale. Now, this is hardly a unique problem. At the time there were several different solutions out there that could help deploy and orchestrate the applications and infrastructure necessary to scale — namely virtual machines (VMs) and their orchestration services (like Vmware’s vCenter). At the uber-massive scale that companies like Google were pushing, however, server virtualization had some serious drawbacks. Enter containers. . .

What is a container?

Essentially, the main difference between a container and a virtual …

Data is the currency of today’s web, mobile, social, enterprise and cloud applications. Ensuring data is always available is a top priority for any organization – minutes of downtime will result in significant loss of revenue and reputation.

There is not a “one size fits all” approach to delivering High Availability (HA). Unique application attributes, business requirements, operational capabilities and legacy infrastructure can all influence HA technology selection. And then technology is only one element in delivering HA – “People and Processes” are just as critical as the technology itself.

For this reason, MySQL Enterprise Edition is available supporting a range of HA solutions, fully certified and supported by Oracle. MySQL Enterprise HA is …

Virtualizing all parts of today’s software infrastructure has become a priority for many. Creating a more flexible and dynamic environment with improved availability enables organizations to accelerate innovation, reduce time to market, cut costs and deliver higher uptime.

Databases have rarely been the first candidates for virtualization – mainly as a result of fears in consolidating such critical resources, and in I/O overhead that may have degraded service levels. However with improvements in hypervisor designs coupled with more powerful commodity server hardware and repeatable best practices, many of these concerns are rapidly diminishing.

It was in this context that we began development of the Oracle VM Template for MySQL Enterprise Edition, making the world’s leading web database radically simpler to deploy, manage, and support in a virtualized environment.

Along with the development team, we will be hosting a …

David Cornelson of TextFyre has embarked on an ambitious plan to create a new open source virtual machine, FyreVM.  This new VM will run Interactive Fiction games (e.g. Zork and newer works written in Inform) on a dozen different mobile platforms such as Android, WinPhone 7, Kindle, iPhone, iPad, Blackberry.  The goal of FireVM is to take advantage of specific user interface capabilities on each platform, whether it's the touch screen of Android tablets or the 5 way button on the Kindle.

To help with this project, TextFyre has started  a fundraising effort on Kickstarter with a goal of …

This is a Request for Input. Dual MySQL masters with MMM in a single datacentre are in common use, and other setups like DRBD and of course VM/SAN based failover solutions are conceptually straightforward also. Thus, achieving various forms of resilience within a single data-centre is doable and not costly.

Doing the same across multiple (let’s for simplicity sake limit it to two) datacentres is another matter. MySQL replication works well across longer links, and it can use MySQL’s in-built SSL or tools like stunnel. Of course it needs to be kept an eye on, as usual, but since it’s asynchronous the latency between the datacentres is not a big issue (apart from the fact that the second server gets up-to-date a little bit later).

But as those who have tried will know, having a client (application server) connection to a MySQL instance in a remote data-centre is a whole other matter, latency becomes a big issue and is generally …

One of the first special reports I wrote for 451 Group was an analysis of the open source systems management vendors on the scene — GroundWork, Hyperic, Zenoss, OpenNMS Group, Nagios Enterprises and some others. These named ones are those that made it and while there was some reckoning in the market and there have been changes, it is interesting to see these players still plugging away, pushing into new markets and powering open source for systems, network and application monitoring and management, including cloud computing environments.

When acquired by SpringSource a year ago, there was some question as to the real value of open source systems monitoring and management company Hyperic, which had taken the …

Of course it’s not quite that simple. I’ve just decomissioned an old Red Hat 7.1 box (hosted dedicated server) that had been in service since 2002, so about 7 years. Specs? Celeron 1.3GHz, 512M, 60GB HD. Not too bad in the RAM and disk realm. It did a good job but goodness am I glad to be rid of it!

Not having that box online is safer for the planet, although it (perhaps amazingly considering the age of some of the externally facing software components) has never been compromised – I consider that mostly luck, by the way, I’m not naive about that. But it’s not easy to move off old servers, it’s generally (and also has been in this case) a lot of work.

Of course hosting has moved on since 2002, places like Linode offer more for less money/month. Of course they virtualise (Xen based in this case) and that’s not been my favourite (particularly for DB servers but depending …

Please make it descriptive, graphic, and if anything burnt or exploded I'd love to have pictures.
Include an approximate timeline of when things happened and when it was all working again (if ever).
Thanks!

This somewhat relates to the earlier post A SAN is a single point-of-failure, too. Somehow people get into scenarios where highly virtualised environments with SANs get things like replication and everything, but it all runs on the same hardware and SAN backend. So if this admittedly very nice hardware fails (and it will!), the degree of "we're stuffed" is particularly high. The reliance in terms of business processes is possibly a key factor there, rather than purely technical issues.

Anyway, if you have good stories of (distributed?) SAN and VM infra failure, please step up and tell all. It'll help prevent similar issues for …